Demons, Saints, & Patriots. Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902-1962)

Few subjects of American religious history have generated the kind of interpretive schizophrenia that has marked the story of twentieth-century Catholic missionary work among Native American tribes in the United States. Until the 1960s, non-Native observers were nearly unanimous in their praise of the Catholic Indian missionary, portraying reservation priests and boarding school teachers as saintly frontiersmen of heroic dedication, sacrificing all to civilize the Indian child and save the Indian soul. In more recent decades, such soaring portraitures have been widely rejected. They have been replaced, instead, by assessments which bring the missionary much closer to earth, assessments which often land the well intentioned women and men of the Church abruptly in the muddy mire of colonial complicity and cultural imperialism.